Tales
by Jedi Master Misty Sman-Esay
Summary: A person's thoughts on some of the horror stories beings tell each other and the origins of a few of them.


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Throughout all the galaxy beings have swapped frightening tales around the tables inside cantinas, in starship hangars, inside military barracks, school dormitories, inside bedchambers and around fires.

The tales range from haunted areas, rooms, corridors, floors, buildings, forests, bodies of water, planets and sectors of space, to ghost ships that appear out of nowhere that may or may not answer your hails or broadcast anything from a plea for help to just a friendly greeting but the ship always vanishes after a certain point to ghosts that still roam places looking for either revenge, a beloved person or just trying to get back home and how, sometimes, the ghost doesn't realize that they're dead to monsters that prey on the unwary travelers that live anywhere from caves, forests, bodies of water and swampy areas to roaming the void between the stars.

Some of the tale tellers are older children looking to scare their younger siblings or other young children. Other tale tellers are older cadets or low-ranking officers looking to scare the new recruits. Others are travelers looking to one up each other in who can tell the scariest or most unnerving tale.

A good portion of the stories that are swapped have no truth to them and have been passed down generation to generation to protect children from getting hurt or losing their lives to fast currents and dangerous predators.

Like the Snjóveiði who told their children monstrous creatures lived under the ice and any young child that wandered alone onto the ice would be dragged down into the freezing waters by the monsters and eaten to prevent children from wandering too far from adults and falling through thin ice or gaps in the ice and drowning or freezing to death in the ice-cold water.

Another decent sized portion of the tales are exaggerated and become more so with each retelling until you can no longer recognize the original tale.

There is the tale of a worker killed due to a mechanical failure or some sort of design failure or safety feature failure at their place of work and do everything from gently warning beings to be careful of what killed them, to pulling beings away from the spot where they lost their life, tell them to move along or get back to work to attacking and attempting to kill whoever they see.

These tales have been intermingled with each other and retold so many times with embellishments no one is completely sure anymore where the original inspiration came from. However, there are similarities between two different stories. One tells of a hostess at a spinning restaurant who tragically lost her life when she stepped between a moving wall and a stationary one and was crushed before anyone knew what had happened and could stop it. Guests and new workers claimed that when they entered the restaurant and prepared for work a soft feminine voice would gently warn them to be careful of the walls.

The other seems to be referring to a foreman that was killed when he fell into a smelting vat and beings that visit the site where the factory used to stand claim that they have seen a badly burned male shout orders and on more than one occasion attacked beings.

Some are just plain old fake.

Like that tale about a long dead mercenary or bounty hunter that's still looking for their target and will kill anyone that fits the description of their target.

Or the one about a mysterious call for help that if you answer you are forced to join the ship's crew until the end of the universe.

Some tales are true though.

Naboo is home to some very dangerous creatures that dwell deep under the seemingly tranquil waters that both Human and Gungans fear. Dangerous creatures do call the Void home, but you rarely see them in open space and often one must travel to more dangerous parts of space to see them.

On Erde there were dense thickets, that a thousand years ago were meadows and fields, where many Republic Soldiers, Jedi and a good number of Caféaulait citizens met their untimely end at the hands of the Sith and the Stain remains. These thickets make anyone passing by uneasy and most avoid them. Some of the beings that have entered the thickets claimed that they heard pleas for help coming from within the forests and the few that have entered and come back out say that the thickets are unnaturally dark, nearly pitch black, and you lose all sense of direction; the whole time you can hear voices begging for help and only escaped because a voice, usually a beloved deceased loved one, guided them out.

In the Kawa Teikoku it seems that nearly everyone knows somebody, no doubt an exaggeration, that has gone to the buried village Yamakawa and done something there, tried to summon the spirits of victims in an effort to get them to move on or perform some sort of mischief or just brought someone(s) there and tell them that four to six meters beneath them is a buried village and how the Sith and their allies had brutally tortured every single person they found in the village and the nearby residences, how their blood turned the ground and the paving stones a red brown and the residence wrote curses in the blood on the ground, and that their Immortal Ten'nō ordered the village to be buried because the Dead wouldn't rest.

Others are just tales that bored beings swap to pass the time.

After all ships just don't appear than disappear from scanners; the ships must have come out of hyperspace and jumped again to hyperspace after making new jump calculations.

Always remember: there is always a logical explanation to tales.

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Finish


End file.
